In this tutorial, Steve will show you how to give your text or logos the appearance of having reflections that interact movement! And you can do all of this in After Effects without using any plug-ins!

Re: Creating Reflections in After Effects WITHOUT Plug-ins!by John Sale76543191

OK, that was a great Tutorial. I am an advanced Photoshop user and 3D artist. Migrating into AE and I must say the fundamental concepts are very nicely presented. A brief question on the use of a Solid with a Cloud/Noise texture with blur... could a fisheye image with motion blur or a perhaps a cropped and stretched wide angle/panorama image be dropped into the text for a reflection? I look forward to jumping in on this one.

You bring up a great question, as does William's comment below. I was doing a little more work with the effect, and not only can you use a fisheye image, but I have also figured out a way to create a sphere map for complete 360 degree reflections. I would like to post a brief, follow-up tutorial on this.

Re: Creating Reflections in After Effects WITHOUT Plug-ins!by William Mitchell76771809

Thanks for this tutorial. Such an effective and smart way of acheiving reflections. Never thought of putting a Noise and Grain on there. I wonder if you could simulate reflection like chrome with a photo and blur it. Pretty sweet tutorial. Thanks

Anamorphic Lens Flare in AEPlay VideoIn this video tutorial, Creative COW contributing editor Grant Swanson will demonstrate how to create anamorphic lens flares using only effects that are native to Adobe After Effects.

After Effects: Using & Customising the Dictionary Preset 1Play VideoIn the first part of this three part advanced text animation tutorial, Andrew Devis shows how to apply and use the 'Dictionary' preset to a paragraph of text and then customise the word selection to match the words we want to use. Andrew shows how to select the words, modify the original text, change the text colour and begin to show what this preset can do as part of a bigger animation where this preset is used to include words which will eventually be individually animated to create a coherent sentence when extracted from the paragraph. In the second tutorial Andrew will show how to create an exclusion group such that the other text can be faded into the background and the final tutorial will show how to animate the selected remaining words into place.

After Effects: Using & Customising the Dictionary Preset 2Play VideoIn the second part of this three part advanced text animation tutorial, Andrew Devis shows how once the 'Dictionary' preset has been applied we can then create a separate 'exclusion' group to fade the remaining unselected paragraph text such that the focus remains on the selected text only - all on a single text layer! The final part of this series will show how to select each of the originally selected words such that they can be independently animated to form a coherent sentence.

After Effects: Using & Customising the Dictionary Preset 3Play VideoIn the last part of this three part advanced text animation tutorial, Andrew Devis concludes by showing how to select the already selected text and animate each word separately such that they can be moved into any order and position to create a coherent sentence from the original body of paragraph text. Andrew also shows how to deal with potential animation problems should you accidentally move the word before setting the stop-watch as well as reminding us of the standard options to help finesse our animation.

You'll be surprised at how late Andrew Devis started with After Effects, but he's thrilled to be constantly learning new tricks. The excitement he finds in turning that knowledge into tutorials has clearly been reciprocated, as he has become one of the web's most popular trainers.

With Creative Cloud updates announced ahead of the 2015 NAB Show, Adobe brings new workflows and expanded collaboration to Pro Video apps, including a Character Animator, new color workspaces and editorial tools in Premiere Pro, and Adobe Anywhere for Teams.

Storage and data management company NetApp announced a set of tools to enhance cloud services, including a more efficient operating system with simple tools to manage data on Amazon Cloud web services.

Kyle Andal and Gerard Andal, lead compositors at Zero VFX, bring invisible post-production magic to several films - including 2014 Academy Award-winning "American Hustle," in which the team helped transform 2013 Boston to 1978 New York - and also several commercial shots with mocha Pro.

LightGrid Script and Demo Tutorial Part TWO with New FeaturePlay VideoLightGrid Script creator Brian Charles demonstrates his newly modified After Effects script for rigging lights in grids and circles. The modified script with the new feature, which adds the ability to enable individual light colors through a checkbox in the effect control panel, is available as a free download in the Project Files folder.